YouTube

Accountability by Metrics OR Taste

Building without KPIs works only with an exceptionally opinionated founder/taste-holder; otherwise you need metrics.

Add a Zero (10x First-Principles Reframing)

Force a 10x version of the goal so the team must rethink the problem from first principles, not optimize the current process.

Additive Hiring

Stop hiring people who fit the box. Hire people who make the team stronger than it is today.

Adjacent User Theory

Find growth by understanding and dogfooding the product as the next user just outside your current base.

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

Argue for the company-optimal allocation of your team even when it defunds you — and read the response.

Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

Ignore role boundaries — use AI tools to execute your own ideas end to end

Alpha Co-Creation Loop

Pick the users who are already pushing the boundary, build with them in a shared channel, ship only when they're thrilled.

Influence3 steps

Anchor High, Never Split the Difference

Find the ceiling; a reflexive split leaves six figures on the table

Anchor the Streak to Your Unit of Use

Tie a streak to the smallest genuinely-meaningful action, not the easiest possible tap.

Anger as a Secondary Emotion

Before reacting in anger, name the fear or hurt beneath it — connecting emotions replace the distancing one

Answer the Question Behind the Question

When caught without a number, answer the adjacent question and surface the real concern.

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

Architect-Then-Delegate AI Product Building

Use AI to prototype and fill scoped sub-segments, but architect and lock the system yourself — don't cognitively surrender.

Peak Performance6 steps

Artifact Reverse-Engineering and Backstage Observation

Collect the best artifacts, reverse-engineer their questions, then go watch the sausage get made.

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

A Stable of Mentors

Keep three or four mentors on a rotating monthly schedule so you always have someone to talk to.

Autonomy as Selfish Leadership

Let people bring themselves to the work; you trade a little visibility for higher velocity, morale, and results.

Autonomy at the VP Level

Place decision autonomy at the VP layer — not the leaves, not the top — to maximize thinking without producing chaos.

Avoidance Reversal

Whatever emotion you avoid, you invite — in exactly the way you avoid it. Backward-engineer any problem.

Back-Channel Reference Digging

Trust peer back-channels over provided references, and probe harder than feels comfortable.

Barrels and Ammunition

Adding headcount doesn't add output — only adding people who drive initiatives end-to-end does.

Finance5 steps

Beat-Your-Plan Fundraising: Trade Dilution for Trust

Pitch numbers you'll hit, eat the lower valuation, and turn every passer into a future lead.

Beginner's Mind Practice

Deliberately clear the expert's mind to keep every possibility open for the next decision.

Be Interested, Not Interesting

Play small talk like hacky sack: set the other person up to succeed and balance disclosure over time

Be Known For Something

Pick one thing to be excellent at, get a reputation for it, and let responsibility flow to you

Bend-Not-Break Flexibility with a Sanctity Keeper

Add flexibility so users don't break a streak — but appoint someone to guard it from being cheapened.

Best-for-the-Role, Not Best-in-Market

Hire for the specific mandate at this specific stage, not the most impressive resume available.

Bezos's Three Tests for a New Bet

Big idea, right owner, legitimate plan — an idea needs all three or it dies

Bias Interrupters for Introvert-Safe Decisions

Design meetings so the loudest 20% can't take 80% of the air — vote offline, then go round the circle.

Black Loops and Blue Loops

Diagram your growth as loops, not funnels — then remove the friction on the sharing edge.

Bloom's Taxonomy as a Coaching Diagnostic

Pinpoint where a struggling PM or manager breaks down along the ladder of critical thinking, then fill that gap.

Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy

Go wide to discover your niche, then put all your wood behind the few arrows that lift the rest

Breath-Taking Questions (Radical Self-Inquiry Prompts)

Journal on questions that scare you — that's where the gold is

Build Champions Before the Offer

The negotiation starts sooner than you think — plant reciprocity and recruit coaches across the org

Build Only Where You Can Be Best (Model Sourcing)

Build in-house only where your unique data or position lets you beat the frontier; otherwise buy

Build on Undiscovered Talent

Beat better-funded incumbents by hiring people the market's hiring machines systematically misprice.

Build Zero-to-One in the Dark

Inside a big company, new products die of attention. Ask for less scrutiny, fewer resources, and room to fail.

Calendar-Defended Proximity

Connection to the front line won't happen by accident as you rise — you have to fight your calendar for it.

Cannibalize Your Own Product Every 6-12 Months

Make your current product look silly on a fixed cadence instead of only shipping what users ask for

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Career-First Management: Help Them Find Their Next Job

Commit to helping reports leave, and win transparency, backfill lead time, and reputation.

CEDAF Delegation Framework

A five-part checklist for delegating without lowering your standards — to humans or AI.

Celebrate Adoption, Not Shipping

Replace hours and feature counts with customer-adoption outcomes teams can actually steer toward

Centralized vs. Decentralized Org Choice

Pick your org model from your product strategy: speed (Amazon) or unified experience (Apple), and accept its cost.

Channel Diversification Before the Drought

A one-channel growth company is always a no-no — turn on the second channel while the first still works.

Chop-It-Up AI Collaboration Loop

Don't hand AI one giant spec — specify a little, review a little, repeat in tight loops.

Clarity and Conviction: Insights, Strategy, Big Rocks

The whole craft of PM in two words, expressed as a two-page narrative every team can recite.

Clarity Over Cleverness in Feature Design

Comprehensibility is a retention lever — make the design a plain distillation of what you're tracking.

Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success

Solve the real problem for real users; architecture and code quality are nearly orthogonal to success

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

Onboard early users in small waves so each cohort surfaces new bugs instead of duplicating the last cohort's feedback.

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

Earn trust before you inflict change: the first 90 days of a leader inheriting a team.

Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

The salesperson is the designer inside the company — your job is to make them a superhero.

Complement-the-Frontier Model Strategy

Don't rebuild foundation models — train small specialty models that attack their weaknesses in speed, cost, and niche tasks.

Compounding Urgency: Pull the Roadmap Up a Week

Ship a week earlier, start the next thing a week sooner, and the gap compounds into a lap.

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

Spread any message outward from your own desk, one audience ring at a time — never skip a circle.

Connect-Users-to-Value Journey Staffing

Growth's job is to connect users to your product's value — so staff teams around each stage of the user journey.

Context Not Control

Your job as a leader is to give people the context to decide well — including the context that isn't flattering.

Controllable Goals

Set goals inside your control (inputs), not outcomes you can't guarantee

Control the Channel, Pace, and Field

Never negotiate over email; slow it down and pick the room where you win

Conversation-Intelligence Deal Diagnosis (the Dealbot)

Run an AI agent over every call, email and Slack to find the real reason you win, lose, and stall

Conway's Law Reorg: Go Functional Before You Go AI

Restructure engineering into one functional org before expecting company-wide AI or technical depth

CORE Feedback Structure

Context, Observation, Result, Next Step — feedback about behavior, never personality

Credits-for-Sharing Loop

Pay users in product credits to publicly share what they built — turn usage into free distribution.

Criticism Triage Under Public Controversy

Separate valid criticism from power-shift noise by going and being your own user.

Criticize in Public

Deliver negative feedback in front of the team so the whole system learns the issue is seen and being handled.

Cultural Erogenous Zones

Stop trying to change what people care about; bridge from what they already care about to you.

Leadership7 steps

Culture as a Product

Every company builds two products: one for customers, one for the team. Culture is the second one.

Customer Zero Launch Motion

Deploy a breakthrough product on yourself first, then use your own results as the sales engine.

Daily Experiments With the Inner Critic

Stop fighting the critical voice in your head. Run a new response experiment on it every day.

Dare to Be Dull

Strive for connection over perfection to free up cognitive bandwidth when speaking spontaneously

Day One vs Day 100 Feature Packaging

Free the features that create the aha moment; monetize the features whose value only emerges at scale.

Deadlines as P-Zero

Have few deadlines, but make each one a P0 that nothing else can touch — and cut scope to hit it

Debate, Decide, Unite: Systematic Decision-Making

Name the decider, list the factors, stack-rank them, then unite behind the call — with calories proportional to consequence.

Decompose-and-Ensemble

Break a broad problem into specific tasks, then solve each with a specialized model in an ensemble.

Define the Mandate Before You Search

Get granular on the outcome, spike, and 90-day plan before opening a product-leader search.

Deflect the Number Question

Never name your figure first; make them reveal the range instead

Demand-Feedback-First (T3/B3)

Force your team to critique you before you critique them — then report back what you changed.

De-Risk the Biggest Swings First

Run discovery and delivery in parallel — and put the top-right, riskiest bets into discovery first.

Peak Performance4 steps

Desensitization for Performance Fear

Neutralize public-speaking (or any) fear by exposing yourself in tiny, low-stakes, escalating doses

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

The more crowded and mature a category, the more design and brand become the deciding differentiator.

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

Fix the incentive system and the time horizon first — everything else about internal incubation follows.

Designing Yourself Out of Your Weaknesses

Refuse to spend years becoming passably okay at something — negotiate the constraint at founding, in writing.

Design the Job to Fit the Person

Stop hunting unicorns against made-up job descriptions; reshape roles around the good people you find

Design Your Day (Calendar as Canvas + Groundhog Day Iteration)

Draw the day you want on the calendar, run it, see what actually happened, adjust, repeat

Detach Self-Worth From the Outcome (The Art-Project Reframe)

Pursue the work as a puzzle you enjoy, not as proof that you're somebody

Disagree With the Founder Via the Spirit

Never say no to the idea — say yes to the spirit and come back with a better path

Discount to Signal Value and Serve the Emotional Job

Set a high list price to signal quality, then discount hard with urgency to let buyers complete an emotional job.

Discover Pain by Watching, Not Asking

Find the real intensity of a problem by watching people work, because they can't self-report it

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

Great salespeople talk under half the time and answer a question with a question about the question

Dogfood-Driven Realism

Be the end user, use your product intensely daily, and never ship anything that isn't useful to you.

Do It End-to-End Before You Hire For It

If the core team can't crack a function once, a new hire won't rescue it.

Dory and Pulse

Write opinions blind, upvote the questions, and mark each person's decision role.

Double Down on the Pull

When something you made gets unexpected traction, drop the plan and lean all-in

Double Down on Why People Love You

Name the core reason users love you, keep investing in it, and build every new product off it

Draft-First LLM Augmentation

Never ask the model to do your job — write your version first, then have it improve it.

Drive AI Adoption By Using It Yourself On A Real Problem

Executives using the tool daily on their own real problems beats any top-down mandate or think-piece

Influence3 steps

Earn the Right to Teach

Build real depth and pedigree first — then your writing has something worth reading

Earn the Secret by Savoring Surprises

There's no recipe for a breakthrough — hunt surprises at the edge instead of validation

Eigen Questions

Rank open questions by how many other questions they kill, then answer that one first.

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

Embrace the Imposter: Act Despite Expecting to Fail

Stop trying to feel confident; give yourself permission to fail and take the shot anyway.

Embrace-the-Next-Thing Mindset

Greet each new technology wave with 'I can't wait for the next thing' instead of resentment.

Emotional Discovery: Feel Bad Like the Customer

On customer calls, dig until you feel the exact emotion the customer wants to avoid, then build to remove it

Emotional Fluidity (Emotional Inquiry)

Unkink the hose: welcome, feel and physically express emotions instead of managing them.

Empathize–Create–Evangelize

The three-stage loop for developing a product vision: understand deeply, imagine the solved world, then sell it.

Energy Drivers and Energy Drains Audit

Mine your past for moments that energized or drained you, then turn them into job design requirements

Engineering Honest Feedback

People withhold feedback because it's risky — your job is to make it safe and rewarding.

Peak Performance4 steps

Engineering the Creative Peak

Single-shot coffee, a two-hour deadline, and a good night's sleep — dial in the state, not just the effort.

Enterprise Price-Ceiling Discovery

Keep asking for more until deals break; losing 20-30% to price is how you find the ceiling.

Enterprise Procurement Navigation

Do procurement's work for them, define exactly what you do, and split contracts so deals don't die on the vine

Eval-Driven Product Development

Design the test for your AI product alongside the product, then hill-climb the model against it.

Excellence Is the Outcome, Not the Artefact

Ask what the meeting is actually for, then spend the effort there — not on the last 20% of polish.

Excitement-Signal Persona Discovery

Ship a broad tool, then let the segment with the most emotive joy tell you who to focus on

Existing-User Retention & Resurrection Priority

As a consumer subscription matures, the biggest lever isn't new users — it's current-user retention and resurrecting the dormant.

Finance4 steps

Expand the Pie with Performance Triggers

Break the salary band by making it 'we' and tying pay to outcomes

Expectation, Gap, Fill

Set the bar explicitly, name the exact gap, then jump in with both feet and close it with them.

Explain-It-to-Prove-You-Understand-It

Force yourself and others to explain decisions; if you can't articulate it, you probably don't understand it.

Explore & Exploit at the Insight Level

Oscillate between finding the right mountain and climbing it — but do it insight by insight, not just at strategy level.

Exposure Time for Taste

Deliberately spend more time learning than building to develop the judgment AI can't give you.

Fail Conclusively (Maximize the Treatment Effect)

Design experiments that kill an idea for good, so no future exec can resurrect it.

Failure-as-Default Framing to Create Startup Scarcity

Openly declaring a new bet will most likely fail buys the autonomy and speed a big company otherwise smothers

Fake the AI Before You Build It

Never train a model for an MVP — prototype the AI's output and test demand first.

Fall-On-Your-Face Taste Calibration

Deliberately push AI past its limits in a safe environment to build a gut feel for what it can do.

Fault-Tolerant User Interfaces

Design your UI to match the real hit-rate of your machine learning, not a fantasy of 100% accuracy.

Fear-Origin Audit for Product Bets

Products built from competitive fear fail; audit the motivation before you audit the roadmap.

Fight for Simplicity: The Third-Order Cost of Complexity

Entropy always wins unless you fight it — price every feature at its dimensional cost, not its build cost.

First-Step Onboarding (Lower Barriers, Raise Delight)

Beat the blank page by walking users through tiny surprising steps until they surprise themselves

Five Principles to Live By

Build, test and refine five simple principles — then decisions get made automatically.

Five-Star Meetings

Make every meeting one people love leaving. The ones that stay bad are a map of your company's real problems.

Flash Tags: The Escalating Opinion Scale

Four hashtags that tell people exactly how much weight to put on your opinion.

Focus With Guardrails

Concentrate on one channel but set abandonment criteria up front so you know exactly when to move on

Follow the Heat

The company's pressure point moves stage by stage; staff it as it moves.

Follow the Pull

Bet your career on the thing you enjoy, are good at, and others value — even if it's not the plan.

Force a Choice, Not a Comparison

Be the world's first banana, not a 10x better apple

Foundational Insight Over Customer Research

For consumer and SMB products, customer feedback is directionally wrong — build from your own insight instead.

Founder-in-the-Details Operating Model

Rebuild a company like a startup: functional teams, one road map, one shared consciousness, CEO in the work.

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

Productivity6 steps

Friction Logging

Adopt a specific user's identity, walk your own product end-to-end, and log every point of friction.

Full-Value Free Sampling (Reverse Free Trial)

Make your free product a live, rationed taste of everything paid can do — not a walled-off basic tier.

Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better

Only a fundamentally different experience gets customers to tell their friends about it.

Gamification's Three Pillars: Core Loop, Metagame, Profile

Durable habit-forming products stand on three legs: a tight core loop, a long-horizon metagame, and an accumulating profile.

Gauge How It Lands

Read the reaction in real time and adjust which axis you move on — sad/mad means move up on care

Peak Performance3 steps

Genius-Zone Time Budget

Spend at least 50% of your time on the work you're both great at and love — it's what keeps you showing up.

Giving Away Your Legos

To let yourself and the company scale, hand off the work you're best at and find joy in enabling others

Leadership7 steps

Golden Rituals (Named, Known by Friday, Templated)

Culture is the product you build for employees; rituals are how you ship it.

Go-to-Market as a Product

Design the buying journey as a sequence of experiences, and add value at every touch whether or not they buy

Group Office Hours Accountability Loop

Peer accountability plus a two-week goal cadence that makes lonely founders execute

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

Taste the soup together — experience the product as a group, log issues live, then debate each one.

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

Growth Is a Game of Inches

Don't chase the step function. Ship 20 bets at 20% instead of 4 perfect ones — then raise the hit rate.

Guardrails Before Control

Set the quality bar, coach to it, then buy control only for the gaps that remain.

Handbook-as-Code

Treat how the company operates as a versioned repo anyone can submit a merge request against

Happy GMV and Minimum Viable Happiness

Track only the GMV that produced a retained customer, and boil the thimble until it clears the bar

Hardest-Side-First (One-Player Mode)

Pre-PMF, ignore marketplace dynamics: own the hardest side and hack the other one.

High-Ceiling Market Test

Attack markets with a high ceiling and easy switching; incumbents win only where there's little left to build.

Hills-and-Valleys: Getting Value From Probabilistic AI Tools

Be patient and explicit, start small, and learn where the model is strong vs weak

Hire for Autonomy: References, Real Work, and Default Trust

You'll be in none of the decisions that matter — so hire people you can hand autonomy to, and verify via references.

Hire People Bigger Than Their Title

Build a small team of high-caliber people who each own more scope than their role, and screen for it with a paid work trial.

Hire Yourself First (Build in Public)

Do the job professionally in public before anyone hires you — then the hire is just changing the vehicle.

Hold the Mindset Loosely, Stay Attached to Growth

Keep the growth, hold the 'mindset' loosely — nailing it down turns growth into a fixed mindset

Human-in-the-Loop Algorithm Design

Decide explicitly what the algorithm owns, what the human owns, and how the handoff works.

Hypothesis-Based Coaching (Explorer, Not Lecturer)

Coach by exploring a well-informed hunch with someone, not lecturing them from data

Hypothesis-First Customer Discovery

Bring a crisp hypothesis to the interview — then be its judge, not its lawyer.

ICE Prioritization (Impact, Confidence, Ease)

Score each idea on Impact, Confidence, and Ease to bubble the best ideas up without over-engineering the math

Impact = Environment × Skills

Audit your career by scoring the environment variables and skill variables that gate your impact.

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Incubate-Iterate-Integrate for Innovating Inside a Mature Product

Build the new experience beside your core product, perfect it, then fold it back in — so you don't break existing customers

Inquiry Before Advice (Be a Thought Partner)

Resist giving advice — explore first, keep the monkey on their back, and develop the person instead of the answer

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

Productivity6 steps

Internal Tools as a Product (The Crying Octopus)

Run your dev-productivity team like a product team: monthly surveys, hard metrics, and one-click paper cuts.

Interview as Discovery: Be the Solution to Their Burning Problem

Treat a job interview like product discovery — find the hiring manager's burning problem and position yourself as its solution

Introvert-Inclusive Meeting Design

Four manager tactics to surface the best ideas from quiet people, not just the loudest three

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

Push hard toward a future you believe in while killing your own hypotheses as data arrives

Job Prototyping via Informational Interviews

Treat yourself as a product: prototype many roles wide, interview people who hold them, then narrow

Keep the Flame Alive: The High-Speed-Train Comms Cadence

Weekly bite-sized, honest updates and 3-minute customer snippets build momentum no one wants to step in front of

Knowledge-Work End-State Idea Generation

Pick an area of knowledge work and reason forward to its end state as AI matures — then build for that.

Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

Willpower never wins. Move the candy further away than the sandwich.

Lean-Into-Organic-Sharing Virality

Don't manufacture virality — instrument where users already share, then make those exact moments 5-10x more delightful.

Leave It Better Than You Found It

Build career capital by making visible, others-verifiable impact — not by collecting logos.

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

Three tests any goal must pass, regardless of whether you call it an OKR.

Live in the Future and Notice What's Missing

Don't try to think of a startup idea — get out of the present so ideas find you

LLM-Optimized Codebase Architecture

Structure your repo so the AI writes the least code possible — infrastructure absorbs the complexity.

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

Long-Term Holdout Experimentation

Ship experiment winners fast, but keep the exposed cohort held and re-check GMV impact at 3, 6, and 12 months.

Finance4 steps

LTV Expansion Over Top-of-Funnel Expansion

When capital is cheap and rivals buy growth, grow the value of organic traffic instead.

Magic and Science Decision-Making

Replace A/B tests and metric goals with deep shared customer understanding, then decide by informed intuition.

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

Filter every opportunity by 'does this advance the main quest, and is it important now or later?'

Make the Implicit Explicit (Meetings and Decisions)

Force every meeting and decision to declare its purpose, owner, and method out loud

Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team

Teams break on the leader's unsorted baggage, not on talent, strategy, or execution

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

A daily four-step loop that changes your defaults instead of making you faster at the wrong things

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

Bring your manager a recommendation to react to, not an open question to solve.

Managing Complex Change

Diagnose why a team is stuck by finding which of five change ingredients is missing.

Manufactured Deadlines

Impose external constraints so solo creative work actually ships

Manufactured Dogfooding

Invent internal reasons for every function to live in your product — quality follows hours logged.

Manufacture Your Own Supply

Find the asset blocking non-suppliers from supplying, then rent it to them with strings attached.

Marketing's Reversibility Advantage: Try Everything, Make Noise

Product changes are near-permanent; marketing changes cost nothing, so experiment relentlessly.

Market Map, Then Go a Layer Deeper

Start from the best companies for a skill, but never assume a great logo means a great individual.

Markets as Currents, Not Bodies of Water

Chase the change dynamic pulling the market, not the size of the market

Match Price to Value with a Value Metric

Pick the unit of value your customer gets, then charge against it so revenue scales as usage grows.

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

Meet-The-Customer-Where-They-Are Marketing

Put your product into the customer's context and re-tune the message for each adopter tier and market.

Metric-Owned Teams with Soft Feature Ownership

Give teams a metric to move, not a feature to own — anyone can touch any surface that helps their number.

Metrics Trees

Decompose your North Star metric and top business KPI into a tree of sub-metrics to align teams and estimate impact

Micromanage the Decision, Not the Operation

Sweat only the few details that matter for the customer — control the decision, delegate the doing.

Milestone-Gated Launch Sequence

Don't spend a dollar on marketing until users start sharing your product unprompted.

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

Model Maximalism

Build at the edge of what models can barely do — the next model will make it sing.

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

Spend two minutes pre-empting the objection you'll obviously get, and stop feeling blindsided.

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

Plot customers on a graph of size plus the attributes that actually drive your revenue, not size alone

Nail the First Three Sentences

Spend a disproportionate share of your time framing the opening — get it right and the rest writes itself.

Negotiate From Genuine Indifference

The best position to sell your company is being genuinely fine not selling it.

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

Get the CFO, the head of people and sales fingerprinted on product strategy before growth goes negative.

No Linear Success Resilience

Expect the roller coaster: massive issues never stop coming, so build the skin to ride them.

Onboarding as a Retention Lever

Treat onboarding as a habit-and-retention engine, not a conversion funnel — and accept lower conversion to weed out the wrong users.

Onboarding Leverage For Robust Products

Use customized onboarding to reconcile simple-enough with pro-grade, and unlock 2-4x activation

Opinionated Defaults for Onboarding

Encode what you've learned works into product defaults — make the right choice easy and the wrong choice hard, without removing choice.

Opinionated Software: Good Defaults Over Flexibility

Ship the one best workflow as a strong default so users spend time on their work, not on configuring your tool.

Opinion-Based Decisions for 1.0 Products

For a first-of-its-kind product, empower a tiny 'tastemaker' team to make gut calls — data can't yet exist.

Optimize Absolute Throughput, Not Local Conversion Rates

Goal teams on the total number of people who complete a funnel stage, never the conversion rate.

Self-Mastery6 steps

Outcome-Backwards Skill Acquisition

Pick an outcome that would prove you learned the skill, then work backwards to the experts.

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Paid Readiness Diagnostic

Read a company's funnel to judge whether paid can be a profitable channel or only a learning tool

Pain-Plus-New-Technology Idea Selection

Judge what's worth building by pairing a habituated pain with a newly-arrived technology that can finally solve it.

Leadership2 steps

Painter, Architect, Surgeon Hiring Archetypes

Match your growth hire to your stage — a versatile painter, a structural architect, or a precision surgeon.

Parallel Draft Divergence

Start one idea 4-5 times in parallel, each with more precision, then pick the obvious winner.

Pattern-Breaking Inside a Big Company

Make small bets that can fail a lot — and hide them from the mother ship

Personal Operating Principles Discovery

Derive how you lead by forcing your values down to three, then plotting your work style

Phase-Bounded Big Bets

Dream big, but chunk the bet into named learning phases with quarterly go/no-go gates

Pinch Before Crunch

Raise small irritations early, while they're still a pinch, before they compound into a relationship-damaging crunch

PMF for Candidates (People, Mission, Financials)

Evaluate a company you might join like an investor evaluates a deal — across People, Mission, and Financials.

PM Your Career Like You PM Your Product

Write a spec for your career: destination, metrics, milestones, and a measuring stick for every offer.

Productivity2 steps

Poor Man's Fine-Tuning (Few-Shot + Role Priming)

Steer a model with in-prompt examples and a role identity instead of a full fine-tune.

Positive Delusion, Bounded by Learning

Assume everything is possible until proven wrong — but keep learning what's actually possible.

Peak Performance5 steps

Practice-Until-Your-Worst-Is-Good-Enough Interview Prep

Interviewing is the one skill with zero feedback — so run dozens of mocks in a small peer group.

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

Same effort, narrower target, more impact — shrink your surface area to raise message pressure.

Price Like a Product (and Unbundle Deliberately)

Align price to where value and cost actually accrue, and kill defaulted freemium and mis-packed SKUs

Price Your Product Like Your Roadmap

Treat pricing as a living system revisited every 6-12 months, not a set-and-forget decision.

Proactive Time Allocation (Kill Fake Work, Guard Relationships)

Stop letting your inbox set your agenda; allocate time from strategy and finite-life priorities instead of reacting.

Problem-First, Wheelhouse-Checked, Unit-Economics-Proven

Three gates a product idea must pass before you build the solution you already fell in love with.

Product-Led SEO (Jobs-to-be-Done, End-to-End)

Map real user jobs to search queries and follow the experience all the way to the magic moment

Product-Market Fit as Segment Territory

Treat PMF not as a binary but as territory won segment by segment, and double down hard on whatever segment is pulling.

Product Marketing Fusion (Inbound + Outbound in One Function)

Merge product management with product marketing so the people who build the product also own how it's told and sold.

Progress Cadence as the Success Signal

Judge a startup by whether each check-in has genuinely new progress, not by hype

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

PSHE — Problem, Solution, How, Execution

Level people by how much of the problem-to-execution chain they own, not by scope.

Pull, Not Praise: Reading Real Product-Market Fit Signals

Judge customer calls by the questions they ask, not the compliments they give.

Pushes and Pulls Compass

You only truly change jobs when a set of pushes builds enough energy and pulls point the direction

Qualification-First Diagnosis

There is no bottom-of-funnel problem — slow deals trace back to qualifying the wrong people, message, or problem

Question the Assumption

Every problem rests on hidden assumptions. Surface them and the problem often dissolves.

Question the Base Assumption Before Build-or-Buy

Before building OR buying a tool, ask whether the process needs to exist at all

Radically Human Support as a Growth Engine

Route every support email to every employee, ban macros, and let candour create word of mouth.

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

Big events only move you temporarily — the real lever is lifting the baseline you always return to.

Raising the Longer-Runway Child

Four principles for parenting introverted or shy kids without shaming their temperament

Rank, Don't Filter

Every user-facing filter silently carves out your supply — turn preferences into ranking signals.

Reason About It Like a Human

To design or debug AI behavior, ask what an equivalent human would do in the same situation.

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

Recall vs. Discovery Interface Split

Match interface density to user intent: dense grids for recall, low-density sound-rich feeds for discovery.

Reduce Monetary Friction to Unlock Hidden Winners

Lower early cost barriers to causally give marginal customers time to succeed, revealing valuable users you'd otherwise lose.

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

Treat each day as an experiment you ran, not a gravestone of success or failure

Reframe Anxiety as Excitement

Relabel the identical arousal response from nervous to excited to calm yourself and speak better

Reframe Self-Promotion as Education

You make the light bulb but you sell light. Rename the act and the resistance disappears.

Relentless Application of Force

The CEO's core job is offsetting the complacency that success naturally breeds — push hardest when winning.

Repair: What Did You Hear Me Say?

When a response feels wildly off, ask 'what did you hear me say?' — then re-try from what they actually heard

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

Announce a slower response cadence with a 'because', then actually slow the hamster wheel

Revealed-Behavior Notification Timing

Trigger reminders off what users actually did, not what they said they'd do — 23.5 hours after last use.

Rewrite vs. Restart: The Plane Decision

Never rewrite a live product with a big customer base; do shut down a small-traction acquisition and rebuild it

Ride the AI Value Wave

Treat today's AI capability as the worst it will ever be and expand where it's most efficacious

Right Model for the Right Use Case

Route each AI feature to a model chosen for that job, not one popular LLM stretched over everything

Ruthless Referencing

Diagnose talent by extracting the right information from many references, not by trusting a 45-minute interview.

Sales Then Logistics

Sell the why before you explain the how, or your ask gets crickets.

Say the Thing You Think You Cannot Say

Voice the hard observation by detoxifying it into a question you own

Schedule Syncing (Managing Your Manager)

Never say no to your boss — show your timeboxed calendar and ask them to help you prioritize.

Sell-Ready From Day One

Acquisitions rarely just happen — seed acquirer relationships early, then run the sale like a fundraise.

Sell to Reduce Risk, Not Increase Upside

Four of five buyers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk — anchor the sale there, not on the art of the possible

Separating Change-Aversion from Real Problems in a Redesign

After a redesign, split 'upset because it changed' from 'upset because it's worse' before you react.

Set the Pace Through Decisiveness (Bias for Action)

A company's speed is governed by how fast it decides, not how hard it works — so refuse to 'circle back.'

Ship-Fast Operating Model

Lightweight bottoms-up planning, PM-light teams, and iterative deployment in a fast-moving domain.

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

Reject the reliability/velocity trade-off: automated gauntlet, ramped exposure, and remediations ahead of roadmap.

Ship Neutral Experiments on Intuition (Aim-Heavy)

When a test comes back neutral, ship the version you'd have built from a blank slate, not the incumbent control.

Ship-Ugly-Then-Polish Craft Loop

Combine shipping fast with fixing fast: get rough builds in front of real users, reserve polish for general release.

Short Toes

Engineer feedback so it lands on the work, never the person — the async collaboration protocol

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Signposting

Use structural cue-words to guide the reader through your writing without heavy formatting.

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

Make it simple, make it show something new, make it feel something — then cut the cleverness.

Simplest-V1-Then-Amplify Experimentation

Ship the barest encapsulation of a hypothesis, confirm it has legs, then beat the heck out of it.

Single-Channel Build-in-Public Bet

Find the one channel that resonates with your exact audience, then double and triple down.

Skill Stack-Rank Interview

Have senior candidates rank themselves against the exact skills the role needs to reveal fit and self-awareness.

Small-Pond ICP Narrowing

Constrain your first ICP so tightly that customers talk to each other — then let word of mouth light the fire.

Soliciting Feedback: The Order of Operations

Ask a go-to question, count to six, listen to understand, then reward the candor

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

Match your stated confidence to your actual evidence — neither overreach nor over-hedge.

Speak Early, Speak From Conviction

Two tactics to get an introvert's ideas heard and acted on in loud meetings

Peak Performance3 steps

Speaking Visualization Rehearsal

Mentally rehearse the whole speaking event in advance to desensitize yourself and gain a sense of agency

Speed-to-Aha Over Best Product

Sometimes the correct product decision hurts the aha moment — cut it and get users to magic faster.

Influence3 steps

Spending Chips: Breaking Rules Without Breaking Trust

Treat accumulated social capital as chips you deliberately spend to break the specific rules that block a new bet

Spirit-First OKRs

Write down qualitatively what crushing it looks like before you pick any number

Stamina as the Kill Signal

Projects die of exhausted stamina long before they die of exhausted money — so watch the team, not the runway.

Start Small, Don't Boil the Ocean

Narrow scope to the achievable thing in front of you, then build momentum on top of it

Strategy-Led Planning

A real, pre-aligned product strategy collapses annual planning from six weeks to three days

Strategy Not Self-Expression

Feedback's goal is behavior change, so cut everything that doesn't serve it — usually 90%.

Stretch With an Anchor

Take the role that will hurt you into growth — but only if one or two things in it are already in your wheelhouse.

Subscription Funnel Benchmarks

Category-dependent conversion thresholds for judging whether a subscription funnel is healthy

Supply-First Marketplace Building

Marketplaces aren't chicken-and-egg — they're two-sided, and you always start with supply.

Surfing the Detail Edge (CEO Engagement Dial)

Stay deep enough to understand, light enough not to hijack — a CEO's every aside is an order.

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

Turn scattered inputs into one distilled idea leaders can repeat from memory in a meeting.

Systematized Creativity by Extremes

Build the most extreme version along one attribute, feel it, repeat in the opposite direction, then find where they meet

Tactic-to-Strategy Discovery

Run many small experiments in parallel, then scale the one that breaks through into your strategy.

Take Your Own Shoes Off

Empathy fails at the removal step, not the entry step — drop your agenda before entering theirs.

Talent Density as Prerequisite

Freedom, low process and candour are not policies you adopt — they are dividends of talent density.

Taste as Shedding Social Proof

Real taste is recognizing what's great before results prove it — by evaluating ideas stripped of their social and authority proof

The 1,000-Experiments 'What Would Need To Be True' Goal

Set an audacious experiment-volume goal — not to hit it, but to force the conversations that unlock a whole experimentation culture.

The 10-Minute PM Test for GTM-Product Partnership

Hire salespeople with enough product depth that engineers can't tell they aren't a PM

The 10-Minute Rule (Surfing the Urge)

Beat any urge to get distracted by waiting ten minutes and riding the emotion until it subsides.

Peak Performance5 steps

The 10% More Enjoyment Test

Enjoyment is a measure of efficiency. Enjoy the work 10% more and you are 10% more efficient.

The 10% Working-Version Rule

Have a testable working version by the time 10% of your time budget elapses, not at the halfway point

The 15% Rule

Step just 15% beyond your comfort zone to deepen relationships without triggering the danger zone

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

The 20-Minute Focus Ignition

Beat the hardest part of deep work — starting — by force-blocking distractions for 20 minutes

The 2-of-3 SEO Opportunity Audit

Decide if SEO is worth pursuing by checking three angles and time-boxing the test to three months

The 30-60-90 Day Landing Plan

Listen for 30, align for 30, execute for 30 — and negotiate the listening time with your manager up front.

The 30-Prospect Manual Discovery Experiment

Before buying any sales tool, hand-pick 30 prospects, write each a real note, and let the response rate reveal your ICP parameters

The 4x4 Debugging Framework

Four escalating ways to unstick a broken build, each tried exactly once, ending by teaching the agent.

The 51-49 Decision Rule

When options are near-even, just pick one fast — more data won't meaningfully improve a close call.

The 7-Minute Felt Gratitude Practice

Seven minutes of felt (not listed) gratitude with another person daily — then aim it at where you feel lack.

The ADD Answer Structure

Answer, Detailed example, Describe relevance: give complete, value-adding responses in Q&A

The Adjacent-Precedent De-Risk Pitch

Win leadership buy-in for a big AI bet by anchoring it to a past bet that already worked.

The AI Expertise Layer

Don't outsource all AI to foundation models — keep expertise and measurement to break the quality glass ceiling.

The AI PM Upskilling Path

Learn the fundamentals, shadow a research scientist an hour a week, and build one model end to end.

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

Score behavioural answers on three axes: did they impose structure, seek inputs, and define milestones?

The Art of Inquiry

Ask genuine what/when/where/how questions from real curiosity — never 'why', never to confirm a hypothesis

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the B-side of your career so a bad season doesn't read as a verdict on your life.

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

Treat every feedback channel as a biased sensor, then hold a portfolio so you have no blind spots.

The BD-Product Operating Contract

Test deals with hacky ops before code, build platforms not bespoke, time product's entry.

The Broken Equation Test

No amount of product craft can fix a company whose underlying math doesn't close.

The Business Is an Equation

Model the whole business as one equation before optimizing any funnel leaf node.

The Calibration Test for Recruiters

Vet a recruiter by testing whether they can play back your brief and name candidates on the spot.

The Cannonball / Lead Bullet Portfolio

Allocate growth energy between a few fundamental rebuilds and many small experiments — by product stage.

The Career-Stage PM Skill Stack

Master three skills as a junior PM, three different ones as a senior — not all twelve at once

The Cascading Metrics Review

One hour a week of public metric probing that forces every leader to actually know their business

The Coaching Model (Coaches, Not Managers)

Replace managers with same-specialty coaches whose only job is your skills and your next level

The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test

A strategy is not an aspiration — it names a specific customer, pain, solution and advantage in one sentence.

The Cold-Pattern Positivity Flip

Find the moments where users feel bad, and flip the product to reinforce progress instead of failure.

The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)

Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.

The Company Operating System (House Metaphor)

Build a company like a house: founding documents, operating system, and operating cadence

The Compelled Test (Storytelling as Product Signal)

After they describe a big problem, measure your own reaction — do you feel compelled to go work on it?

The Compelled-to-Work-on-It PM Interview

Hire PMs by testing whether their story makes YOU want to go work on their boring old problem.

The Complicity Question

Ask how you helped create the conditions you claim you don't want, to reclaim your agency

The Confidence Meter

Score how much evidence actually backs an idea, from a shiny pitch deck (0.1) to a live A/B test (10)

Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

Remove the humble answer, borrow someone else's eyes, or jump three years forward — self-awareness can't hide.

The Consultative Interview Flip (Sell the Vacation)

Run the interview like an enterprise sale so there is no competition when the offer comes

The Contributor Path: Pick the Equation, Not the Title

You don't have to raise the seed round; join a team whose math already wins.

The Creator Growth Triad

Consistency, collaboration, and curator association — the three levers that have made creators since 2010.

The Cross-Functional Pricing Process

Stand up a pricing committee, mine demand and willingness-to-pay with structured surveys, then set price.

The Daily Highlight

Pick the one thing you want to name as today's highlight, size it to 60-90 minutes, write it down

The Deep Dive PM Interview

Make candidates write real async requirements and defend them — a two-way test for remote PM fit

The Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

Only hire when a function is underwater, so headcount forces ruthless prioritization

The Delight-First MVP Test

Don't launch until the product sparks joy in your first users, because they are your only growth channel

The Design-Partner Pod Model

Give each cross-functional pod 6-12 real customers to co-build with, so features ship pre-validated.

The Diversification Timing Test

Know whether it's too early to diversify growth channels or dangerously overdue

The Double Triangle: PM as Go-To-Market Discipline

Sit the PM between two triangles — build (eng/product/design) and sell (sales/marketing/PM) — and originate the customer's language

The Dummy Explanation (Escape Your Bubble)

Write every message as if the reader knows nothing about you, your product, or your market.

The Early-Adopter Rejection Math

Reframe customer outreach: reach 10 to find 1, and indifference isn't rejection

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

The Effort Metric (Measure Attention, Not Completion)

Track 'did I do what I said for as long as I said without distraction' instead of whether you finished.

The Empathy Steel-Man Decision Framework

Make each side argue the other's case, then name the tiebreaker and the deadline before debating.

The Engineer-cation

Leaders clear 3-4 days, join a team as an IC, ship one small feature to production, and log the friction.

The First Performance Review Reference Call

Ask a cherry-picked referee what feedback you'll give the candidate at their first review — they can't dodge it.

The Fish-and-Water Strength Test

Your real strength is the thing others praise that you think is no big deal.

The Five-Day Design Sprint

Go from zero to a tested prototype in five days — decide with customer reactions, not hunches

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

The Four Career Quests

Diagnose which of four job-change 'quests' you're on so you optimize the move correctly

The Four Challenges of AI Product Management

Uncertainty, pivots, data scarcity and a broken promo path — the four taxes of the AI PM role.

The Four-Component Cold Outreach Message

Open cold with relevancy + a counterintuitive hook + a problem (never the solution), kept short enough not to scroll

The Four I's Feedback Structure

Information, Impact, Invitation, Implications: package feedback so it lands as collaborative problem-solving

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Four P's: Potential, Probability, Passion, Prowess

Score any idea on four factors — and always compute potential before probability.

The Four Questions Career Self-Audit

Four honest questions that surface the root causes of a stalled, stressed, or frustrating product career

The Four Tests of a Compelling Product Vision

A vision must be lofty, realistic, free of today's constraints, and anchored to a potent problem.

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

The Friction Commitment Test

Deliberately make the next step hard to filter for buyers who truly want it.

The Full-Stack Centralized Insights Org

Keep data, research and engineering in one central team — objectivity is the asset you're protecting.

The Future Headline

Write the tech-press headline your launch would earn, mocked into the real publication's page.

The Galvanizing Activation Metric

The activation number's job is organizational momentum, not statistical precision.

The Generalist Placement Play

Put a non-expert in charge to unlock 10x thinking, then hire the expert and get out of the way.

The GIST Board and Outcome Roadmaps

Replace release roadmaps with a living board of goals, ideas, and validation steps that the whole team owns

The GIST Model

Split product work into Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks so evidence — not opinion — drives what gets built

The Going Direct Playbook

Build one owned channel, voiced by a real human, primed before you ever need it.

The Growth Competency Model

Four competency buckets for hiring, evaluating, and balancing a growth team without chasing a unicorn.

The GTM Engineer Agent-Deployment Loop

Turn a sales function into an AI agent by shadowing your best rep, then redeploy the humans up-market

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

Ask what's the hardest thing they've ever done, then extract their difficulty bar and how much agency they had.

The Hierarchy of Engagement

Three stacked levels — core action, accruing benefits, self-perpetuation — that decide if a consumer product endures

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Hierarchy of Marketplaces

Focus, tip, dominate — the only sequence that produces a marketplace worth owning

The Highest Best Use Interview

Ban hypotheticals, ask for lived history, and finish by asking what a great day looks like.

Leadership8 steps

The Hiring Signal Stack Rank

Reference check beats work sample beats interview — and run the reference check first.

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

Ask what conventional wisdom is inaccurate — it's unanswerable without genuine opinion, so it exposes authenticity.

The 'How to Work With Me' Document

Scale culture through one written doc: expectations, your real flaws, your commitments.

The Human Behind the Role

Optimise for being loved, not liked — earn the right to give raw feedback by proving you care first.

The Indistractable Model

The four-step system for controlling your attention: master triggers, make time, hack back, and pre-commit.

The Indistractable Workplace (Three Traits)

Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction — fix it with psychological safety, a forum, and leaders who model it.

The Inflection Stress Test

Four questions that separate a real inflection from a vague 'why now'

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

It's done when it makes YOU laugh or tear up — not when someone else approves it.

The Introspection Probe (Decoupling Decisions from Outcomes)

Ask for a win that worked for the wrong reason, or a good call that failed — outcome-blind introspection tests.

The Introvert's Career Visibility Playbook

Five moves to get your value seen and your ambition known without becoming someone you're not

The Inverted W Planning Process

Teams propose, leaders synthesise, teams adjust, leaders resynthesise, orgs distribute with context.

The Keeper Test

Ask monthly: if this person quit today, would I fight to keep them? If not, have the conversation now.

The Learning-Impact Ladder

Alternate between roles where you have mastery and roles where you're the newbie — zigzag, don't climb.

The Lighthouse Users Program (10 → 100 → 1,000)

Deliberately serve a tiny, named set of customers through defined stages instead of chasing MAU too early

The Lindy Commitment Test

However long you've sustained something is roughly how much longer you can trust it to last.

Communication7 steps

The LPM Method: Engineering a High-Stakes Keynote

Decompose public speaking into subskills, then optimise humour with a measured laughs-per-minute score.

The Marginal User Method

Find the user on the cusp of converting, then go watch the worst-case version of them.

The Market Health Metric

Find the leading proxy that predicts liquidity, then find the threshold where it plateaus.

The Marketplace Priority Stack

Pre-commit an explicit ranking of who you serve first, so thorny trade-offs resolve themselves.

The Marquee Mock Exercise

Hand everyone blank App Store screenshot panels and make them draw the world where the problems are solved.

The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto

Automatically say no to customization features that ease manager reporting at the cost of IC workflow

The Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

Ship five things people love, not fifteen things that merely work

The Minimum Viable Experiment Trap

A lean test that strips out the mechanism doesn't test the idea — it buries it.

The Model Launch Bar

With probabilistic products, the PM — not the scientist — decides what accuracy is good enough to ship.

The N+1 Rule: Simplest Thing Until It Breaks

Start with the simplest possible policy, then prove by induction it still works at the next headcount.

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

Growth masks all problems — so ask what you'd do if growth went negative, before it does.

The Once Upon a Time Vision Story

A five-blank Mad Libs template that turns a product vision into a story anyone can retell.

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

Peak Performance4 steps

The One-Skill Six-Month Block

Go all in on one skill for 3-6 months: study one example a week, practise it an hour a day.

The Operator's Manual (Answer First)

Answer the question, then explain — or shut up. The tactical checklist for PM communication

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

The Orchestra Leader Model

A great founder conducts every function at once, not just the instrument they love to play.

The Organ-Rejection Test for Innovation Teams

Three conditions that stop the core org from rejecting your new-bets team like a foreign body.

The Owner-Not-Renter Veto

How a PM says 'not yet' to an executive chain that desperately wants to scale.

The Pantry Test

If the idea starts with the ingredients you already have, you are not working backwards

Marketing6 steps

The Peer Supply Engine

Pay your best suppliers to onboard and recruit the next ones, at a tenth of the cost.

The Pixar Career Story Template

Distill your career into a seven-line Pixar-style story that intrigues interviewers and clarifies your direction

The PM Owns the Why

Don't spec the what — distribute the why so hundreds of local decisions come out right.

The Portfolio Growth Model: Optimize for Churn

Lower the barrier to entry and accept high churn; a few power-law winners make the whole cohort pay off.

The Post-Interview Culture Probe

Give a strong-but-culturally-questionable candidate blunt feedback and hire on how they react.

The Pre-Need Talent Pipeline

Build relationships with great people long before you have a role open, with no agenda.

The Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

Ask what work they're proudest of and why — it exposes taste, standards, motivation, and where their gravity pulls.

The Radical Candor 2x2

Care personally AND challenge directly — the two axes that place every act of feedback

The Reboot Leadership Equation

Practical skills + radical self-inquiry + shared experiences = better leadership and resilience

The Relentless Iteration Loop

Read-through, add, repeat 50-100 times, set aside, return — then hand to editors. That's the secret.

The Remote-First Operating Stack

Five mechanisms that make an all-remote company across 60+ countries actually work

The Repeatable Idea Test (Put the Pill in the Cheese)

Engineer a message people repeat for their own reasons — memorable, effortless, and never an inside joke.

The Research Coordinator Role

Borrow the recruiting-coordinator role to schedule all customer research, so PMs never lose time to logistics.

The Roadmap Is a Story, Not a Spreadsheet

Lead with themes and a narrative; link out to the systems for the granular how

Peak Performance3 steps

The Rule of Lung

Make your exhale twice as long as your inhale to trigger the relaxation response before speaking

The Sean Ellis Scale Gate

Never scale a product until a calibrated share of users would be 'very disappointed' without it.

The Service-First Wedge

When the buyer has no process to buy your tech, sell a time-boxed service that gets you the logo, revenue, and the pen

The Shiny Object Trap (Problem-First AI)

A regular PM ships the right product; an AI PM solves the right problem.

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

The Six Characteristics of Exceptional Relationships

A diagnostic checklist of six qualities that mark how far a relationship sits along the contact-to-exceptional continuum

Influence6 steps

The Smallest-Ask Mentor Ladder

Never ask 'will you mentor me?' — ask a two-minute question, then earn the next rung.

The Soft Pushback

The one-line, zero-aggression ask that recovers ~20% of comp almost every time

Productivity6 steps

The Source-of-Truth PRD Cascade

Spend a day writing five layered docs so the agent, not you, carries the context on every build.

The Spiral Method for Learning Fast

Chain expert-to-expert referrals until you hear only repeats — that's how you know you've hit the bullseye.

The Swipe File

Capture examples of communication that work — the act of collecting trains your eye.

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

Cap a candidate to two questions on a fictional problem to reveal whether they can find the decision-driving question.

The Three B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

The Three Career Conversations

Past, dreams, and action plan — three 45-minute conversations to show you care and grow people

The Three Concentric Circles of Evangelism

Socialise a vision outward: core team, then stakeholders, then leadership as high as you can reach.

The Three Elements of a Breakthrough Idea

Grade any startup idea on inflections, insight, and founder-future fit — not the implementation

The Three Generations Rule

Make the product, fix the product, then fix the business — innovation almost never lands in one generation.

The Three Growth Engines Selection

Diagnose which of virality, SEO, or paid your product can actually grow on before spending on any

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

The Three Levels of Product Work

Align your role with your default level — impact, execution, or optics — instead of climbing into frustration

The Three Pacts (Pre-Commitment Firewall)

Lock in your intentions ahead of time with an effort pact, a price pact, or an identity pact.

The Three Pattern-Breaking Actions

Movements, storytelling, and disagreeableness — how you get people to move to your future

The Three-Pillar AI Integration Model

Build where you have data advantage, partner for commodities, and open an app ecosystem for the rest

The Three Realities and the Net

Stay on your side of the net — speak only to behavior and your own reaction, never the other person's motives

The Three-Signal Marketplace Screen

Fragmentation, uniform needs, high matchmaking barrier — no marketplace works without all three.

The Three-Slide Believer Pitch

What you do, your non-obvious insight, then proof — built for believers, not objectors

The Time-Boxed First 90 Days

Build context 5x faster, leave a plan behind, and don't spend trust you haven't banked

The Time-Boxed Leap Bet

De-risk a scary career leap by treating it as a fixed-length experiment with a fallback

The Tippability Test

Check supply fragmentation, supply heterogeneity and incumbent competition before you fund a marketplace

The Tomorrow Test for Saying No

Decide whether to accept a distant commitment by imagining you had to do it tomorrow

The Transparency Ramp

Default everything to public except three named exceptions, then ramp until it feels uncomfortable

The Triple-A Apology

Acknowledge, Appreciate, Amend: apologize for the transgression, not for how someone feels

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

The Two-Question Introvert Diagnostic

Two thought experiments that reveal your true temperament preference, cutting through learned behavior

The Two-Way Door Reality Check

Most decisions that look reversible are one-way doors at your level — pause before you commit

The Two-Year Publishing Cadence

Write a post several times a week for two years and an audience will find you

The Ugly Baby Test

Seek ideas that make smart peers laugh — real alpha lives in the ugly babies everyone dismisses.

The Validation Gamut (Assessment, Data, Tests, Experiments, Release)

Validate an idea's assumptions cheaply first — assessment and data before you ever build, fakes before you build for real

The "What's Holding You Back" Office Hour

Replace status updates with one question that surfaces the single true bottleneck

The WHAT Toast Structure

Why we're here, How you're connected, Anecdote, Thank you: a GPS for any toast or tribute

The 'Why Now' Perishability Test for Internal Pitches

A good business case that lacks a strong 'why now' trigger gets parked; make the opportunity feel perishable

The Wonder-Explore-Make-Impact Incubation Gate

A four-stage vocabulary with 6-pager gates that lets a big company incubate new bets without prematurely scaling them

The Worst Product You Ever Shipped

One interview question that separates PMs with real reps from PMs with a clean résumé.

The Zero-to-Seven-Day Retention Sprint

Concentrate experiments and flexibility on the first 7 days, where loss aversion actually locks in.

Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It

Four product phases where spend rises stage by stage — so you must retire risk before the money starts.

Three-Model Triangulation

Apply three different mental models to a problem; agreement across them sharply raises your odds of being right.

Three Ways to Find Marketplace Whitespace

Unbundle a low-NPS segment, own an ignored niche, or change the atomic unit of supply

Timeboxing Your Values (Make Time for Traction)

Replace the to-do list with a weekly timeboxed calendar built from your values across three life domains.

Tipping Loops: Growth Loops and Happiness Loops

Two symbiotic loop types — one grows the marketplace, one keeps it happy as it grows

Top 10 Things You Should Know

A living, stack-ranked problem doc every PM owns — and every stakeholder must fill in too.

Top-Down / Bottoms-Up Core Action Analysis

Cross two analyses — return-propensity ranking and product purpose — to find the one action worth optimising

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Treat Your Course Like a Product

Hypothesise the audience, interview them, iterate the ICP, and run three weeks — not one.

Trust as Currency

Trust is built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations — and it buys you resources

Truthful Storytelling Through Relentless Refinement

Sell the why, not the what — and refine the story out loud on real listeners until it comes off effortlessly.

Tuning Your Operating Cadence

Set review rhythm by two signals: too fast if no progress, too slow if content is stale

Two-Day Work-Test Hire

Bring finalists on-site for two days to do a real end-to-end project — it screens skill and fit at once.

Two Product-Market Fits

A marketplace must pass the disappointment test independently on each side.

Understand Work (Understand → Identify → Execute)

Budget intentional time to understand a problem first, so your team ships fewer things with a far higher win rate.

Value the Technical Co-Founder

Why engineering is the hard part, and how a non-technical founder should actually treat it

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

Build where the winning data is locked behind a company or industry's walls — foundation models won't go there.

Visibility Signals Importance

Users care about a feature in proportion to how much the product visibly cares about it.

Vulnerability-Based Customer Discovery

Admit you're early and unfinished (even if you're not) to get raw feedback, then gate-check whether the problem is real

Want Over Should (Self-Discovery, Not Self-Improvement)

Replace shoulds with wants and experiments — self-improvement encodes 'I'm broken' and slows evolution.

WeDash: Mandatory Dogfooding as a Culture Governor

Make every employee do frontline work, then advertise it in interviews to self-select hires.

What / So What / Now What

A three-part structure that turns any on-the-spot update or answer into a memorable, digestible message

Win-Rate-First Funnel Math

Stop obsessing over conversion rate — a high win rate means you need far less top-of-funnel throughput

Working Backwards (Problem-First Product Development)

Start from the customer problem, not the ingredients you happen to have in the pantry

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

Write What You Repeat

If you say it more than once, write it down — then get an accountability partner to enforce a monthly cadence.

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.

Zig While Others Zag: High-Conviction, Low-Consensus Bets

Pick a small number of contrarian bets, hold them for years, and build a heuristic that tells you when you have drifted.